Toolbar

Item

Tooltip and Shortcut

Description

Refresh N/A

Click this button to refresh the status of all files in your workspace, modified both through MPS or through any other application.

If you are using Perforce as your version control system, only the status of files modified through MPS will be updated. This approach improves performance, as it does not require connecting to the server, but it does not let you get an update on the changes made outside MPS, for example through the p4v client application. If you want to get an update on all changes to your workspace, use the Force Refresh option.

Force Refresh

This button is only available if you are using Perforce as your version control system.

Click this button to refresh the status of files in your workspace, both modified through MPS or through other applications.

Click this button to have MPS open or close the Preview Diff pane to compare the current file with the latest committed revision.

N/A

Click this button to show the corresponding MPS help page.

Changelists pane

This pane shows all your changelists, and the files that have been modified in each changelist.

If new files have been added to your project that have not yet been checked-in to a version control system, the Unversioned Files node appears under which all such files are listed. If you have a large number of unversioned files (over 50), they are not displayed in the changelists pane. Instead, the Click to browse link appears. Click this link to open the Unversioned Files dialog to review the list of unversioned files. You can quickly delete unversioned files from the Changelists pane or the Unversioned Files dialog by pressing N/A, or add them to the VCS by pressing N/A.

This option is only available if you are using Perforce as a version control system.

Select this option to shelve your changes in Perforce. You will be asked to select which files you want to shelve and provide a description. After you've shelved your changes, the corresponding changelist will appear. You can unshelve it any time from the changelist's context menu.

Refresh

N/A

Select this option to refresh the status of files in your workspace.

Local History

N/A

Select this option and choose one of the following from the popup menu:

This behavior is supported only when the Differences Viewer is invoked from the Version Control tool window.

Compare Previous/Next File N/AN/A

Click these buttons to compare the local copy of the previous/next file with its update from the server.

These controls are only available if more than one file has been modified locally.

Jump to Source N/A

Click this button to open the selected file in the active pane in the editor. The caret will be placed in the same position as in the Differences Viewer.

Viewer type

Use this drop-down list to choose the desired viewer type. The side-by-side viewer has two panels; the unified viewer has one panel only.

Both types of viewers enable you to

Edit code. Note that one can change text only in the right-hand part of the default viewer, or, in case of the unified viewer, in the lower ("after") line, i.e. in your local version of the file.

Perform the Apply/Append/Revert actions.

Whitespace

Use this drop-down list to define how the differences viewer should treat white spaces in the text.

Do not ignore: white spaces are important, and all differences are highlighted. This option is selected by default.

Trim whitespaces: ("\t", " "), if they appear in the end and in the beginning of a line.

If two lines differ in trailing whitespaces only, these lines are considered equal.

If two lines are different, such trailing whitespaces are not highlighted in the By word mode.

Ignore whitespaces: white spaces are not important, regardless of their location in the source code.

Ignore whitespaces and empty lines: the following entities are ignored:

all whitespaces (as in the 'Ignore whitespaces' option)

all added or removed lines consisting of whitespaces only

all changes consisting of splitting or joining lines without changes to non-whitespace parts. For example, changing a b c to a \n b c is not highlighted in this mode.

Highlighting mode

Select the way differences granularity is highlighted. The available options are:

Highlight words: the modified words are highlighted

Highlight lines: the modified lines are highlighted

Highlight split changes: if this option is selected, big changes are split into smaller 'atomic' changes. For example, A \n B vs. A X \n B X will be treated as two changes instead of one.

Do not highlight: if this option is selected, the differences are not highlighted at all. This option is intended for significantly modified files, where highlighting only introduces additional difficulties.

Collapse unchanged fragments

Click this button to collapse all unchanged fragments in both files. The amount of non-collapsible unchanged lines is configurable in the Diff & Merge settings page.

Synchronize scrolling

Click this button to simultaneously scroll both differences panes; if this button is released, each of the panes can be scrolled independently.

Editor settings

Click this button to invoke the list of available settings. Select or clear this options to show or hide whitespaces, line numbers and indent guides, to use or disable the use of soft wraps, and to set the highlighting level.

These commands are also available from the context menu of the differences viewer gutter.

This button only appears on the toolbar when the Use external diff tool option is enabled in the External Diff Tools settings page.

HelpN/A

Click this button to show the corresponding help page.

N/A

Annotate

This option is only available from the context menu of the gutter.

Use this option to explore who introduced which changes to the repository version of the file in question, and when. The annotations view lets you see detailed information for each line of code, such as the version from which this line originated, the ID of the user who committed this line, and the commit date.